Book review: Revenger, by Alastair Reynolds

29082017

Alastair Reynolds is a British SF author best known for his ‘Revelation Space’ novel sequence, although by now he has many other strings to his bow. His work is known for its generally faithful adherence to hard-SF principles while often managing, also, to incorporate elements of space opera.

One of the reasonably widely accepted positions on the tropes of SF is that space piracy, as a concept, makes no sense, either logistically, physically, or economically. Revenger is a hard-SF novel, with strong YA undertones, about space pirates.

Arafura (‘Fura’) Ness is persuaded by her older sister Adrana to sign up for a six-month stint as ‘bone reader’ (in essence, a scryer of information gleaned from the technologically-augmented skulls of long-dead aliens; a task that can only be performed by those with the right combination of neural plasticity and cognition—which means, in practice, teenagers) on board Captain Rackamore’s sunjammer Monetta’s Mourn. Rackamore is a pirate, of sorts, but his primary interest is in plunder, not violence; and with fifty million formerly-occupied habitats, most of them sealed and left derelict, in orbit around the Old Sun, there’s opportunity aplenty for treasure-seekers trying to find tech relics of the Solar System’s many vanished civilisations. But Rackamore also has unfinished business with the infamous Bosa Sennen, whose Nightjammer is a watchword for terror, out in the Big Empty; and when Monetta’s Mourn comes off second best in an encounter with Sennen’s ship, Fura finds that she, too, has unfinished business with Bosa Sennen …

Revenger takes on the style of the pirate yarn whole-heartedly, from the stereotypically motley crews of misfits and ne’er-do-wells to the instantly-recognisable speech patterns and superstitions, and bolts these attributes onto a hard-SF framework that treats issues of intrasystem ballistics and momentum conservation with deadly seriousness. It’s a combination that could well seem ludicrous, and yet it works well, helped considerably by a tense and taut storyline that never really lets up and by characterisation that imbues Fura and those around her with complexity and pathos. If it’s not Reynolds’ most memorable achievement, it is, nonetheless, undeniably, a lot of fun.